Here is an article about the father and daughter team. It shows how they have the story of Treasure Mountain confused with the legend of the Lost Mine of the Window.
I personally don't think they have found anything, and I doubt they ever will.
UncleMatt, I think you bring up a couple of points that folks recognize but seem reluctant to talk about. Anyone that's done research, particularly on legendary treasures, recognizes a few things real fast. Namely that give time, treasure stories do two things...they migrate and they cross-pollinate.
I got started researching with a book many of you are familiar with, Buried treasures in the USA by Robert Marx. Back of that book had a state by state guide with two or three sentence stories, hundreds of them, for each state. Over the years, anyone that's familiar with the Penfield/Carson/Henson state guides, or the Thomas P. Terry treasure atlases are familiar with the format. Point is, all that information and if you read it and have a semi-decent memory, things start to jump out.
I first got into the Montezuma treasure story because I noticed it cropped up a lot. Over the years, I collected 50 or so versions of the story from every SW state, Mexico, Central American, even as far east as Illinois. Point is, I became fascinated with the stories, not as legitimate sources of information (for the most part) but as a historical and cultural phenomenon. I had to ask myself, why do so many places have the same story, what is it about their locale that supports it, and how have these stories impacted local communities and people. It's not hard to imagine, when you plot the points of many of these stories, how a story can often "travel" when not anchored by a specific locale (say, the Lost Dutchman or Victorio Peak). Person A hears a story in Town A...as a traveler, either running cattle, hopping a train, or simply going out to see ole Aunt Myrtle, he finds himself telling that story. Person B at Location B hears the story, and in subsequent retellings, some information is changed, added or lost and quickly the new story becomes part of the local folklore, takes root, and begins to bear fruit. This is sort of the nuts and bolts of folklore migration. Initially spurred on by the remoteness of populated areas, it was easy for a story to take hold and nobody say, "that sounds an awful lot like a story down in (insert town a hundred miles away or so). Many of these stories took hold and were later supported by treasure writers who shared the stories in books and magazines without citing original sources, either written or verbal. Poor sourcing meant nobody could challenge the veracity of the story or challenge the fact that many stories crop up over and over again. Treasure books and treasure writers were created for a niche audience, rarely digested in huge quantities and until the last 25 years, people had a pretty hard time "comparing notes." I think this is a big part of why the Internet has not only opened these stories to scrutiny, but culturally, people are more "sophisticated" and stories like this are on death's door where the public conscious is concerned. The big stories limp along, but before a small elite brotherhood had and discussed the information, now its freely available and is being poked to death by the more cynical among a brotherhood that hasn't grown, but has certainly become much more interactive and self-aware.
Another fantastic example of this sort of migration is "mine with the iron door" stories. With minimal research I can tell you there are well known (though not necessarily well supported) stories of "mines with an iron door" in Idaho, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma...and those are merely the one's that have been written about at length. My suspicion is one of these stories had some chops...but all of them?
My quest for Montezuma also exposed me to a tendency for stories to cross pollinate. Uncle Matt's assertion that the father/daughter team have crossed their wires story-wise is a fine example. I've found writers cobbling together theories of the inter-related nature of Montezuma's Treasure with the Lost Dutchman, Victorio's Peak and the Lost Rhoades Mines. For whatever reason, there is a tendency to find comfort in connectivity and similarity, and many writers have, in my estimation, muddied the waters by combining stories with no evidence and as a result sewing crop of confusion and further apathy and disinterest in "the big stories."
These are just a couple of observations I've had as a researcher, a good source though is the Motiff Index that was printed a number of years back that describes Arizona treasure tales. There the writer tries to discredit stories by comparing similarities. I'm not suggesting that all or most of these stories are false. On the contrary, I'm simply pointing out that human nature, the evolution of technology and the bad habits of many writers have created an environment where fact and fiction may never be completely separated. If the stories are true, the twisted nest of evidences have only been made all the more difficult to separate.
I'm too much of a romantic to cast off these stories as completely the product of fancy...but anyone researching or educating themselves on a story had best know what they're up against...
